The Method of Successive Assembly System Design Based on Cases Studies within the Swedish Automotive Industry

Abstract

This chapter presents and illustrates a design procedure applied at several Swedish assembly plants during the last 15 years. This procedure has been used for the design of the Volvo Uddevalla plant in 1984–93, the Volvo Truck plant in Tuve in 1988– 90, the redesign of the Volvo main plant in Torslanda in 1989–90 and the design of the Autonova plant located in Uddevalla in 1996–1997 as well as for the restructuring of the information system at the Scania diesel engine assembly in the main Srdert/ilje plant in 1998–99. The first four cases concern the design, or redesign, into unorthodox parallel product flow, long cycle time assembly systems, while the Scania case deals with improving the shop floor information in a traditional serial flow assembly system (an assembly line)—that is, improvement of work instructions and product variants codification. A more efficient introduction of product design change was an unforeseen consequence of the adoption of parallel product flow, long cycle time assembly systems, which require a restructured information system. The parallel product flow, long cycle time assembly systems, have merits in form of efficient flexible manufacturing compared to traditional assembly systems owing to reduction of losses, increased flexibility and better space utilization than for serial product flow assembly systems.